Category: Religious institutions

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 5

The new year is getting close, and to finish this top ten list before the end of the old year, I’m going to have to

6. I’m not sure this has really been happening, but it seems to me there has been decreasing tolerance within Unitarian Universalism for anti-Christian bias. You know what I mean by anti-Christian bias: the willingness to explore any major world’s religion except Christianity; a fear of acknowledging that we once came out of Christianity; a willful blindness towards our Christian past and the associated refusal to use certain words (“God,” “worship,” “Jesus,” etc.) that remind of us whence we came.

We Unitarian Universalists have good reason to be anti-Christian: from our beginnings we got called heretics by other Christians, and a hundred years ago we got kicked out of various Christian clubs like the National Council of Churches, and in the middle of the twentieth century the Neo-Orthodox dismissed us. Even today, a scholar like Gary Dorrien can’t quite keep the scorn out of his authorial voice when he writes about nineteenth century Unitarians in his histories. So we got in the habit of thinking: Hey, if the Christians don’t want us in their club, why should we want anything to do with Christianity?

Yet though we have grown into something that is no longer a Christian denomination but something else (we’re not quite sure what), we still carry grew out of the fertile ground of the Radical Reformation, and of the English free church movement, and of American freethinking Christians. The roots of our commitment to social justice, the roots of our use of reason in religion, the roots of our belief that love is the most powerful force in the universe, all go back to that fertile ground.

Thus I have been pleased to see what I believe is a growing respect both for our Christian past, and for those among us who still claim the name “Christian.” Maybe we have gotten so far from Christianity, maybe we are so obviously no longer a Christian sect, that we can relax a little bit.

5. We have definitely made some real progress in preventing clergy sexual misconduct this year. Most of this progress has been made by the UU Ministers Association (UUMA), which is remarkable in of itself: ministers have generally been woefully bad at policing themselves when it comes to sexual misconduct. But the UUMA has begun to make some real progress.

In one example of progress, Rev. Deborah Pope-Lance was invited to give this year’s Berry Street Lecture, she spoke on clergy sexual misconduct, and hundreds of ministers sat and listened to her in rapt silence. Mind you, Deborah has been speaking out for years on the evils of clergy sexual misconduct, but it has too often seemed as though other ministers were not particularly willing to listen to her — what was remarkable was seeing so many ministers watching with apparent approval and interest.

In another example of progress, the members of the UUMA voted in June to approve a new amendment to the professional guidelines — but there was a sense that even the new amendment wasn’t strong enough, and so a committee has already drafted a new, stricter, amendment. One could be cynical and say that by telling clergy that they can’t have sexual contact with anyone they serve in their ministries, the UUMA is merely catching up with what is already the law in 27 states in the U.S. But I’m not cynical, because it would be very easy to ignore those state laws; and besides, my impressions is that the new amendment will be even stricter than those state laws.

Obviously, there is still lots of work to be done. I would love it if the Unitarian Universalist Association didn’t take quite such mushy stands on clergy sexual misconduct. I would love it if some of the Unitarian Universalists who work on legislative action would start actively pushing for laws against clergy having sex with congregants in the 23 states without such laws. But after years of very little progress in this area, I’ll take what I can get.

Not working on Christmas? C’mon

I was talking with a friend of mine who’s a music director at a mainline Protestant church (no, not at a Unitarian Universalist congregation). “So do you have to work Christmas day?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “They’re not having services on Christmas day.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

He was not kidding. “We’re not have services on January first either,” he said.

“I don’t understand churches that don’t have services when Christmas falls on a Sunday,” I said. “It’s the sabbath day, of course you have services.”

He nodded tolerantly at my ranting.

“You know,” I continued, “shutting down a church on Christmas day usually has nothing to do with theology, or with the liturgical calendar. It mostly has to do with the senior pastor’s convenience.”

He just grinned. “Maybe, but I’m just as glad,” he said. “It means I get to have two Sundays off in a row.”

“There is that,” I said. Though for my part, I like working when Christmas falls on a Sunday — the people who come to services really want to be there, and it’s always fun. (And yes, we are having services in Palo Alto at 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. on Christmas day, with the Forum at 9:00 and brunch at 10:30. Stop by if you’re in the area.)

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 4

7. This year, for the first time, I feel as though Unitarian Universalism has made some real progress towards figuring out how to be a religion that’s not totally dominated by white folks. (Notice how I’ve qualified that statement: the progress we’re making is towards figuring out how to be less white.)

What progress have we made?

First of all, we’ve begun talking as though racism within Unitarian Universalism means more than just the white folks dominating the few black folks. After a couple of years of having a president of the denomination who is Latino, we’ve finally figured out that there are Unitarian Universalist Latinos, too. We have gotten to a point where we finally seem to understand that our efforts at eradicating racism have to go beyond the binary white/black racial divide.

Secondly, our collective anxiety seems to have gone down somewhat. It used to be that as soon as you started talking about race within a group of Unitarian Universalists, everyone would get so anxious that everyone would freeze up, and the conversation would either end or devolve into ideology and blame games. But this year, I’ve been at several public meeting where white Unitarian Universalists could talk openly about race and racism. (I credit Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed for much of this progress: he has an amazing pastoral ability to get people to talk openly and genuinely about race and racism without freezing up or getting strident.)

Those two things may not seem like much, but they represent some progress. And that’s both amazing, and worth celebrating.

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 3

8. You know how people keep saying that young adults don’t want to go to church any more? You know those surveys that say young adults are drifting away from religion? Maybe that’s true considered across the vast mass of population of the United States, but I’m seeing something else going on. In spite of what the Baby Boomers are saying, I’m seeing twenty-somethings coming to our Unitarian Universalist church and liking it.

However, the twenty-somethings are doing church a little differently than the Baby Boomers and older generations. They don’t necessarily come every single week (though quite a few do). They like to use social media to relate to church, and to each other. Since many of them grew up without much or any religion, they don’t all have the same desperate angst about religion that many older Unitarian Universalists do. They seem a lot more relaxed about religion than older folks.

I admit I’m biased: I really like the current twenty-something generation. Taken as a whole, they’re pleasant, quite interested in exploring religion and spirituality, and very committed to social justice work. I hope they come into our churches and droves and take over.

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 2

9. Rethinking districts

This past year, I have been encouraged that quite a few people smart people have continued working on how to refashion the inefficient and inequitable district system.

As it stands now, the Unitarian Universalist Association (the UUA) is the national association of congregations; it is an incorporated non-profit. At a regional level, we have what are known as the districts, which are all separately incorporated non-profits. The UUA provides field services by partnering with the districts to jointly hire field staff (primarily district executives and district program consultants). Thus, field staff are jointly supervised by, and paid by, two separate non-profit corporations: field staff report both to a supervisor at the UUA, and to the board of the local district. This is not only a grossly inefficient system, it is a system that is inherently a breeding ground for conflict.

Equally bad, a congregation will get a different level of services based on which district it happens to be in. Some districts have a full-time district executive, and that’s about it. Other districts have a district executive, a program consultant, both of whose salaries are partly paid by the UUA, plus an administrator, and other part-time staff such as a youth programs coordinator, etc. The fact that the UUA provides more money to field staff in some districts than in other districts is problematic. But then too, the number of congregations in a district varies widely, meaning that congregations in the smaller districts have more access to field staff than congregations in larger districts. All this represents an inequitable use of the UUA budget.

Over the centuries, Unitarians, Universalists, and now Unitarian Universalists have used a variety of organizational structures to link the national organization with the individual congregations: Universalist state conventions, the Western Unitarian Conference, etc. We have a long history of having to change these organizational structures in response to changing times. It’s pretty clear that we can no longer afford the inefficiencies built into the current district system; nor should we have to put up with the inequities. I don’t know what the new structure should look like, but I’m glad that there are smart people experimenting with ways to share field staff resources, communicate better, and provide a more efficient and cost-effective delivery of field staff services.

Click on the tag “Top Ten in 2011” to see other posts in this series.

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 1

As we come to the end of the year, I’ve been thinking about the state of liberal religion in 2011. For once, I’m actually feeling kind of hopeful about liberal religion; for once, I’m feeling as though liberal religion might not die out in another 20 years. Mind you, it’s still touch and go, but I feel the odds of survival have gone up from two in five to three in five. And so I’m going to start a series of posts on the top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011.

10. The Great Recession

How can I possibly think that the Great Recession is one of the top ten best things to happen to liberal religion this year? Before I answer that question, I have to tell you a dirty little secret: the majority of Unitarian Universalist belong to a congregation with more than 250 members; yet half of all our congregations have fewer than 100 members.

Now I love small congregations, and have served three congregations with fewer than 100 members. But for the past forty years, while long-term economic trends have been forcing most of the non-profit world to become increasingly efficient, small congregations have, by and large, refused to change. Thus we see many small congregations that both refuse to grow to the point where they would be economically viable, and at the same time refuse to consider the possibility of cutting their budgets.

The Great Recession is forcing many congregations to face up to the fact that they are on the horns of a dilemma: they must either grow, or slash spending. After enduring nearly three years of a lousy economy, these congregations can no longer put off the inevitable: will they pass through the horns of the dilemma by cutting expenses, or will they wrestle the dilemma to the ground and vanquish it (at great risk of being gored) by learning how to grow the congregation?

Thus, for many congregation, the Great Recession has made their preferred third option — continuing to rest on the horns of the dilemma by changing nothing — untenable. This is actually fantastically good news: those congregations resting on the horns of that dilemma were actually stuck, going nowhere. It’s boring being in a stuck congregation, going nowhere. So with any kind of luck, the Great Recession is going to continue to force many congregations to get unstuck.

Mind you, getting yourself unstuck from the horns of a dilemma is not a pleasant experience. Those horns you’ve been stuck on are sharp, and when you pull off of them, you’re liable to start bleeding. But the horns were going to kill you in the long run: best to get the pain over with as quickly as possible, and if the Great Recession forces you to do that, then it is a fantastically good thing.

My only fear is that too many congregations will choose the easy way out: they’ll try to slide between the horns of the dilemma by cutting staff or building maintenance. Or worse, they’ll try to slide between the horns of the dilemma by increasing revenue in ways that allow them to avoid taking responsibility for raising their own money, e.g., excessive drawdown of endowment, excessive rental of building, involvement in harebrained moneymaking schemes, financial illegalities, etc. My hope is that the Great Recession is going to force a lot of congregations to focus tightly on their mission in the world, and to cut away all that is extraneous.

Next: 9. Dealing with race

What, Christmas carols already?!

There are some good carols that don’t appear in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. One of my faves, “O Tannenbaum,” isn’t in the hymnal, and I realized that I had made a PDF file of the sheet music (with a decent English translation of the original German words), sized to fit on a half-sheet, perfect for an insert in an order of service. There’s probably someone out there who could use this PDF, so here it is:

“O Tannenbaum,” PDF file

Happy 375th birthday

My home congregation, First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts, the Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in, just celebrated its 375th birthday. My dad, who is still a member of that congregation, attended the festivities. In fact, he was one of the honored guests at the birthday banquet last night:— he was one of 16 people who have been members of the congregation for 50 or more years. He and my mother joined First Parish not long after I was born, and there’s a story behind that.

My mother had grown up Unitarian, had been the Superintendent of the Junior Department of the Sunday school of the Wilmington, Delaware, Unitarian church back in the 1950s when they had something like 600 kids in their Sunday school, but when she and my father moved to Concord, she did not go to church. The minister at that time called on her to find out why she wasn’t coming to church, and she told him it was because she had an infant (me) and a toddler (my older sister Jean), and there was no child care during the Sunday services. So the minister recruited a woman named Betsy Connelley, along with some other people, to serve as volunteer staff in a child care service they called “Pooh Corner” (and before the wiseacres in the audience ask, it was named after Winnie the Pooh, and the name had nothing to do with the diapering process). Once there was child care, my parents could attend Sunday services, and 50 years later, my dad is still a member there. Moral of the story: provide great child care in your congregation.

Dad told me that one of the honored guests sitting with him last night was none other than Betsy Connelley. She still remembers me, and asked me dad to say hi. One of the best things about congregations is the sense of continuity they can provide; they are communities in which human connections can be held for generations.

So here’s to First Parish in Concord on its 375th birthday!

“The coming death tsunami”

The Ministry Matters blog has a good post on how a projected increase in U.S. death rates could affect congregations. Here’s a graph of the projected rise in death rates:

The post is an excerpt from the book Focus: The Real Challenges that Face the United Methodist Church by Lovett Weems. While the United Methodists have been declining faster and for a longer period than have Unitarian Universalists, the predicted rise in U.S. death rates could have a similar effect on both congregations: older members, who are the biggest givers, will be dying off more quickly than we can replace them by younger people. And this will have serious financial implications:

Countless churches have fewer worshipers today than they did ten or twenty years ago. Most of them, however, have budgets as large as or larger than they did when they had more constituents, even after adjusting for inflation. Such a congregation manages in the early years of decline by the greater giving of their fewer participants. As things get tighter, the lowering of expenditures combined with greater per capita giving maintains financial stability.

A church then gets to a point at which attendance has declined so much that making the budget each year becomes the preoccupation of the church and its leadership. Each year they search for that one new source of income or cut in spending so they can manage to make their plan. They also realize that even these yearly heroic efforts will not be enough going forward as they note the high percentage of their annual giving that now comes from those over age 70.

Weems advocates making budget cuts now to increase financial viability for the future; you can read the whole post here. From my point of view, the most important point is to get away from putting the budget at the center of a congregation’s reason for existence: if a congregation is really focused on “making the budget,” you might just as well close the doors now, and save everyone the heartache of decline; for it will be, not the imperceptible decline that’s going on right now in many congregations, but a heartstopping avalanche of decline.

A portrait of the minister as a misconductor

Recently I received an unsolicited book in the mail. As a minister and as a blogger, I sometimes receive unsolicited books in the mail, usually on topics in which I have no interest, and I generally toss them straight into the recycling bin. Upon opening the envelope, I read the title of the book, Being Alive and Having To Die: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church, and having no interest in Forrest Church I headed for the recycling bin. But before I tossed the book, I thought to myself, “I wonder if the author dared tackle Church’s sexual misconduct?” The author did dare, so I decided to read on.

Dan Cryer, the author of Being Alive and Having To Die, portrays Forrest Church as having come from privilege. The son of Frank Church, a prominent U.S. Senator, Forrest Church could trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower through both his mother and his father. He grew up in large part near Washington, D.C., in a county with the highest per-capita income in the country. His father went to Stanford University, and that’s where Forrest received his undergraduate degree. Although he was estranged from his father during the late 1960s, as were so many upper middle class young men of his generation, he once avoided arrest because U.S. Forest Service troopers liked his father’s pro-conservation initiatives in the Senate. Forrest Church continued following his father’s footsteps: his father had gone to Harvard Law School, and after a year at Pacific School of Religion Forrest transferred to Harvard Divinity School.

He married Amy Furth when they were both undergraduates at Stanford. Cryer’s descriptions of their marriage makes Forrest Church sound like a male chauvinist pig, e.g., “…the young husband did have a bad habit of wounding Amy by making important decisions without consulting her” (p. 65). Beginning in 1976, Church began having affairs with other women, although he himself “declined to characterize these as ‘affairs'” (p. 188). After he was called to the prestigious pulpit of All Souls Unitarian in New York (in “that nation’s wealthiest ZIP code”[p. 110]) in 1978, the affairs continued, though not with members of the congregation. By 1991, the marriage of Amy and Forrest Church “had been shaky for a long time” (p. 187). It was in that year that the whole thing blew up. Continue reading “A portrait of the minister as a misconductor”